Friday, November 6, 2015

dance 98

Dance acts at CMJ 1998 alternative music seminar

Village Voice November
17th, 1998

by Simon ReynoldsIt's
been a year of musical agnosticism, with no single zone of sonic activity
compelling enough to warrant monomania. Indie-rock hipsters are now as likely
to check out dance music, while club-music mags, responding to the ennui
engendered by a decade of dance-and-drug culture, are broadening their coverage
to include rock: usually instrumentalists such as Tortoise and Fridge, but
sometimes proper bands, like The Verve or Spiritualized, who have some kind of
narco-spiritual kinship with rave. Given this backdrop of confusion, perhaps
it's not surprising that this year's CMJ featured almost as much top DJ talent
as the Miami Winter Dance conference.

At
Bowery Ballroom Wednesday, Lo-Fidelity Allstars made a brave but clumsy stab at
incorporating the science of dance music into the attack of rock'n'roll. The
band's debut, How To Operate With a Blown Mind, is an oxymoronic
masterpiece of "darkside big beat," documenting the normalized
malaise of British polydrug culture, where clubbers boast about getting
"messy" on a cocktail of diverse chemicals. Onstage, unfortunately,
the band's rave'n'roll hybrid offers neither the machinelike precision of a DJ
nor the charismatic spectacle of a band. Still, the vandalized disco of
"Blisters on My Brain" dazzled the ears like the Gallic glitterball
house of Stardust and Daft Punk.

That
same night, Speeed's four-floor, 24-DJ extravaganza promised big fun, but
actually delivered (thanks to oddly sparse attendance) a disappointingly
vibeless experience. In the cavernous, almost deserted basement, U.S. house
gods Deep Dish wove an alternately honeydewed and harsh web of textured rhythm;
later, "surprise guests" Sasha & Digweed, accustomed to audiences
of several thousand, attempted to please a crowd that was simply absent. Elsewhere,
old-skool nostalgia seemed to be the ruling flavor: Monkey Mafia's Jon Carter
played a very peculiar remix of Prince's "When Doves Cry," Les
Rhythmes Digitales's Jacques Lu Cont offered a pitched-up, helium-squeaky
version of A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray," and Glasgow's DJ Q
dropped a crisp and spangly selection of disco cut-ups and filtered house. Just
about the only breath of techno futurism came from Moby, who climaxed his set
with a searingly celestial trance track, origin unknown.

Some
of the week's best action was at parties not listed in the official program,
but loosely affiliated to the schmooze fest and free to badge holders. On
Thursday, New York hardcore techno label Industrial Strength brought gabba to
the Sapphire Lounge. Lenny Dee resurrected the bombastic Belgian techno vibe of
Brooklyn warehouse parties circa 1991; Parisian DJ Manu Le Malin stressed
gabba's claims on the phuture with punishing yet atmospheric gloomcore. Later
that night, Paul Oakenfold and sidekick Dave Ralph pleasured a packed Irving
Plaza with sets of epic house and melodic trance that alternately tugged at the
heartstrings (twinkly, plangent riffs) and insulted the intelligence (schlocky
grand piano chords, Enya-esque Celt-diva vocals).

Like
the Lo-fi's mishmash on Wednesday, the lineup at Irving Plaza on Saturday
exposed the fallibility of live techno. Instead of transcendently tweaked-out
turntablizm, Josh Wink opted for fitful, real-time performance of his own
music. Then industrial dance veterans Meat Beat Manifesto churned out one
torpid-tempo'd, quasi-funky track after another, making you wonder why main man
Jack Dangers bothers hiring a live drummer if he just sounds like a
state-of-the-art-circa-1990 breakbeat loop. With the post-MBM set from Wink
never materializing, the night ultimately confirmed a stubborn truth about
dance music: with scant few exceptions, it's a DJ thing.